Typical hospital beds are designed with numerous functionalities to facilitate patient comfort and safety and to facilitate the ability of caregivers to provide efficient and effective care. However, most hospital beds are designed to accommodate patients of average size and weight. For bariatric patients, i.e. morbidly obese patients having extremely large sizes and whose weights can be as high as 1000 pounds or greater, normal hospital beds are generally too small and lack sufficient structural strength to withstand the load of a bariatric patient. Special bariatric beds have been designed to accommodate bariatric patients, but these beds generally lack the functionalities of regular hospital bed. Further, bariatric beds are generally specialized only for bariatric patients, limiting their use for general patient care, which ultimately increases hospital costs to have such bariatric beds in stock without seeing regular usage.
There is a need in the art for a hospital bed that possesses the same functionalities as regular hospital beds but can be converted between a regularly sized hospital bed and one that can accommodate bariatric patients.